Google Lens is one of the most useful apps on a smartphone, using your mobile camera for text recognition, object searching, and more. Now one of the best Lens features is coming to Gboard. 9to5Google reports that Google is now bringing what it calls Text Scanning to Gboard. We can confirm that this feature has indeed appeared in the beta version of Gboard.
A feature of Google Lens is coming to Gboard
This is pretty much a simplified version of Google Lens’ optical character recognition (OCR) functionality. However, you can find it by tapping the tools menu in Gboard and selecting it or dragging it as a shortcut to the Gboard toolbar.
After enabling the feature, Gboard will ask for your camera permission. The camera viewfinder will then cover the bottom half of your screen. From here you can take a photo of the text, highlight the text you want to import, and tap “add” to add it to your existing text field.